Huntsman wants hefty pay raise for state execs

Top state executives will get a 2.5 percent cash pay raise this coming year, just like other state workers.

But Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. has supported a different pay plan — one adopted by the Senate in special session Wednesday night, but rejected by the House.

Under that plan, a few Cabinet members could have gotten a 30 percent pay hike or more this year — assuming the department bosses could find the money for their raises in their own budgets and Huntsman set their pay at the higher levels.

The Senate bill could have cost an extra $234,400 in top executive pay raises starting July 1.

Rep. Greg Hughes, R-Draper, led the fight to stop the higher raises, telling a House and Senate conference committee that it is the wrong time to increase some Cabinet salary ranges by such an extent this year.

Just six weeks ago, legislators trimmed back state workers' retirement health-care packages, a move that angered many state workers and led to e-mails and phone calls to lawmakers.

Rep. Lou Shurtleff, D-Ogden, worried that under the Senate bill a state boss could lay off a secretary or other low-paid state worker to get the money to fund his own pay raise, something that Huntsman aides say would have never happened even if the Senate bill had passed.

As it turned out, lawmakers approved top state executive pay raises on the same scale as other state employees' — 2.5 percent more in cash and another 2 percent in benefits.

And legislators instructed the Executive Compensation Commission, headed by John T. Nielsen, an attorney/lobbyist for Intermountain Health Care, to study Utah's executive pay plan over the next year.

Huntsman and leading legislators believe Utah is not paying its top bosses enough.

"Some of the positions in the Cabinet, they're very underpaid right now," Huntsman spokeswoman Tammy Kikuchi said.

"The feeling is we may not even be able to keep" some of the men and women Huntsman recruited into state government when he took office in January "if something isn't done," Sen. Dan Eastman, R-Bountiful, told the conference committee Wednesday night just before the Legislature adjourned its two-day special session.

Of specific concern is Dr. David Sundwall, the new executive director of the Department of Health. Before coming to the University of Utah, from which Huntsman hired him, Sundwall spent 23 years in Washington, D.C., and, among other posts, was the chairman of the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee for the Centers for Disease Control.